Monkey (1985)
Screenwriter: Edwin Catmull / Malcolm Blanchard / Alvy Ray Smith /David DiFrancesco /John Lasster
Genre: Animation
Country/Region of Production: United States
Language: English
Date: 1985
Adaptation: Retelling
Summary:
The book The Pixar Touch details how the Pixar team of the day, Edwin Catmull, Malcolm Blanchard, Alvy Ray Smith and David DiFrancesco along with "interface designer" John Lasster, started plans to produce an adaptation of a book called "Monkey", which was based on the tale of the Monkey King (also referred to as Sun Wukong) and itself adapted from the 16th Century Chinese novel Journey to the West. The idea first came about in 1985, when Pixar were still part of Lucasfilm. The following year they spun-off as a corporation, with funding from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs who became its then majority shareholder, and Pixar took the Monkey project with them.
In the original 16th Century novel Journey to the West, the Sun Wukong is a monkey born from a stone who acquires supernatural powers through Taoist practices. After rebelling against heaven, he is imprisoned under a mountain by the Buddha. After five hundred years, he accompanies the monk Tang Sanzang and two other disciples on a journey to retrieve Buddhist sutras from the West (the Indian subcontinent), where Buddha and his followers reside.
Many adaptations had appeared across the years, in both tranditional text and Manga form. It seems that Pixar's version was inspired by one of the latter and would have the feel of a buddy-movie road trip. The character of monkey was described as being a trickster and magician. Together with a priest the pair have adventures on their trek from China to India. The Japanese publishers of the Manga, Shogakukan, were in negotiations to finance the film, and John Lasseter designed some sketches for the title character.
At this point in time, Pixar as a company were primarily focused on developing their RenderMan software, their own proprietary platform to create 3-D realistic computer animation. Aside from The Adventures of André & Wally B they hadn't been overly concentrating on producing CGI animation productions themselves. Of course, that would very soon change, and Lasseter's Luxo, Jr. would arrive in August 1986 (eventually becoming the company's mascot, replacing the original design at the top of the page). But Luxo, Jr. ran to just two minutes, and as Pixar went into talks with Shogakukan it became clear just how much of a time commitment a feature-length CGI animated movie would be for them. And equally Shogakukan discovered just how expensive it would be too. Both sides came to an amicable agreement that the time wasn't right to continue, and so Monkey never even made it to the storyboard stage.
Source: http://www.warpedfactor.com/2021/06/monkey-pixars-first-abandoned-movie.html
